At Communispace, I listen to a lot of community member conversations. Our Communities help companies listen to the voice of their customers 24/7 in a private, online environment that bears some similarities to other social networks. So it’s inevitable that, like any social network, the members end up sharing a lot—with one another and with us—and we listen to all of it. My favorite example is how one woman told the community she was expecting even before she told her husband! Our members share pictures of their homes, families, vacations, and food pantries. They upload videos and hop-on live chats at the drop of a hat. As time goes by, our connection to our members deepens, giving us permission to dig deeper and ask more, and empowering us to deliver their messages in more meaningful ways.
So what do you do when a community member expands the relationship beyond the community and friends you on Facebook? Suddenly you have access to even more information about him or her. Are you free to share that information with the executive that sponsors the C-space community he or she is a part of? Or is it personal information that’s best kept personal?
It seems that there are more tools than ever to help us to get to know one another.
Journalists who do investigative research are also faced with these issues. A good friend of mine just attended the SLA (Special Libraries Association) conference in D.C., and reported back on a presentation given by Meg Smith from the Washington Post. Apparently news reporters are increasingly using social networks for investigative research—but they have to decide what the ethical boundaries are when they are thinking about printing specific information.
Take the case of a devastating car crash in Maryland that resulted in the death of one driver and the hospitalization of the other driver. The hospitalized driver had a MySpace page, where she made several references to drinking alcohol while underage—and even posted a photo of herself holding a half-empty bottle of rum while driving her car. But police had not indicated that alcohol was a factor in the crash, so if the reporter called out the references to alcohol, and drinking and driving on her MySpace page, they would be introducing personal information that wasn’t necessarily relevant to this crash. According to Meg, this could have been potentially libelous, since there’s “nothing about that MySpace profile that suggested she had been drinking the night of the accident, and accusing someone of drunk driving could expose a newspaper to a libel suit if it’s not true.”
What to do? Anyone could have turned up the MySpace profile, but they couldn’t mention it without the police confirming that alcohol was a factor. So a commenter accused the reporter of not living “in the modern world” because he thought they missed the MySpace angle altogether.
Social networks can lead us to information that few other public records can—the comments people make on their public walls can tell us quite a bit about that person’s mindset, behavior, and even their value system. So, how should this information be used, if at all? I would love to hear your thoughts.
If it’s public, it’s in play and people need to realize this about their data, social networks and otherwise. But great perspective, just because a company can use the data doesn’t mean they should – at least explicitly.
Another example Meg gave was around gang members. Many partake in social networking, and it’s possible to glean a lot about the dynamics of the members through their profiles. Not to mention an overall picture of organized crime in the areas they live in…
This post underscores a worrying trend: the voluntary and oft ignorant shedding of privacy. Of course, it is not as surprising if one considers the incredibly short term of our public memory. Not even two full decades after the fall of communism and its privacy-invading governments around the world, we have forgotten the value of the thing.
A wife sharing news of a newborn with strangers on the Internet before her husband? That is not to be applauded: it is appalling and sad. What day is this, that we cannot live in the moment with the people in our presence? Are we so alone and starved for attention that we go to such lengths seeking it? Ponder these things, I ask you.
The immediate, surface gains of such technology are apparent; however, I would suggest that the losses are far more substantial, though not, perhaps, visible at first.
Evan, thank you for your post – your observation is a valid one. It will be interesting to watch the pendulum swing the other way in extreme examples like the one Meg gave – in other words, I suspect it won’t be long until schools and community leaders start educating students on the value of privacy, and the perils of broadcasting information about yourself that could be detrimental to your future (i.e. getting into college, getting a job, etc.)
But by thinking about privacy in terms of absolutes, we miss out on examining how the definition of privacy might be changing because of technology. I would argue that there is a big difference between broadcasting information about yourself on a public forum and doing so in a private, online environment.
For some, private communities facilitate an expansion of their inner sphere, and for others, they create an inner sphere where maybe they didn’t have one. Not necessarily a bad thing. A woman who spends time every day in a private online community of other women just like her – well, she feels that these are the people in her presence. They have become a support system for her. She turned to her community for ideas and advice on how she should tell her husband, because the community knew how long they had been trying.
To her, it’s still private – which is really interesting, and worth a closer look.